Google Gets On the Right Side of History — The Chinese people will learn who their real friends are. — One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called “The File” by the British historian Timothy Garton-Ash.

A Heated Debate at the Top — Co-Founder Brin Pushed for Backing Out of China, While CEO Schmidt Made Moral Argument to Stay — Google Inc.'s startling threat to withdraw from China was an intensely personal decision, drawing its celebrated founders and other top executives into a debate …

Google's Threat Echoed Everywhere, Except China — BEIJING — Google's declaration that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country ricocheted around the world Wednesday. But in China itself, the news was heavily censored.

Baidu Soars As Google Threatens To Leave China — Hardly surprising, but also worth noting is that Google's (GOOG) threat to shutdown Google.cn and leave the China market is sparking a mammoth rally in shares of Baidu (BIDU), the leading China-based search engine.

Google detonates the China corporate communications script — Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google's bombshell blog post, which went up [in the middle of the night] early this morning our time.

Apple's tablet is an “iPhone on steroids” — One of our close Apple connects who hasn't steered us wrong dropped a little bit of information on us. Here's what we know: — The tablet's multi-touch gestures are “out of control.” — It's powered by an incredibly fast ARM CPU

Apple App Store Has Lost $450 Million To Piracy — Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and the companies that sell software for the iPhone and iPod touch at the App Store have lost over $450 million to piracy since the store opened in July 2008 according to an analysis by 24/7 Wall St. There have been over …

Shutting Down Rupert Murdoch's Social Experiments Lab — We hear News Corporation is winding down MySpace spinoff Slingshot Labs, a vestige of the media conglomerate's efforts to retain MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe. But the labs are hatching one last diabolical plot, on behalf of the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail takes the lead on email security — Last night, Google announced that Gmail sessions will now be fully encrypted with HTTPS by default. This is excellent news — EFF congratulates Google for taking this significant step to safeguard their users' privacy and security.

Apple ‘experts’ to debut in retail stores within weeks — Apple's retail “experts” — a new position that will serve as a roaming counterpart to existing “geniuses” at brick-and-mortar locations — are expected to debut in stores in a matter of weeks, people familiar with the matter have told AppleInsider.

Samsung Announces First 32 GB MicroSD Memory Cards — The upper-end of the microSDHC category has been reached! Samsung has announced that they're working on 32 GB memory cards, which will be good news to media hogs who have long capped out 16 GB cards on their mobile phones.

Zimbra: Yahoo Wasn't a Fit — After spending $350 million and two years of effort, Yahoo officially announced yesterday that it was selling its open source Zimbra e-mail collaboration unit to VMware. — So why the change of heart? — In conversation with InternetNews.com …

AP Reportedly Close To New Licensing Deal With Yahoo — Looks like the Associated Press's licensing negotiations with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) are going much better than those with Google (NSDQ: GOOG). The WSJ reports that Yahoo and the AP are close to reaching a new deal that would …

Intel cites AMD exec who ‘would never buy’ AMD — In a recent response to longstanding antitrust accusations from chipmaking rival Advanced Micro Devices, Intel included in a Federal Trade Commission filing a quote from one of AMD's own executives critical of AMD chips.

Google rules search in December, Bing drops — Google continued to dominate the search market in December, trailed by Yahoo and Microsoft, according to media research firm Nielsen. — According to Nielsen's December U.S. Search Rankings, released on Wednesday, Web users queried search engines more than 9.9 billion times in December.